Page 20 of Star-Crossed
Lyra blew out a gusty exhale and let her head fall back against the couch cushions as she stared up at the ceiling. “Basically, you’re telling me that you came to the back of the bus because you thought I was pretty and smart and had been planning this for long enough that you did actual internet research for a topically appropriate come-on line that might spare you the wrath of my infamously sharp tongue.”
“Yeah,” Cy said, setting his own beer bottle aside. “That’s about it.”
“Well, shit.” Lyra’s face rolled toward him on the cushion. “Now I kinda feel bad for wishing you dead by especially creative and painful means all these years.”
Cy tipped the last of his beer down his throat to distract himself from the subtle warmth of Lyra’s bare knee radiating against his forearm. “You almost got your wish.”
A crease appeared between her brows.
So, the spillways of Townsend Harbor’s gossip mill didn’t stretch as far as the East Coast.
She didn’t know.
“What happened?” she asked gently.
“A car accident,” he said. “I, uh…hit a cow.”
Lyra blinked at him, her brow furrowed as she studied his face for an extended beat. Perhaps, he thought, attempting to decipher if he was fucking with her.
“No.” Her voice carried the tolling finality of a gavel strike.
“Yes,” Cy said.
“No.”
“Still yes.”
Lyra pushed herself upright, her pretty painted toes brushing his knee as she did so.
“That’s just… No. There’s no way. The odds against something like that happening to one persontwicenot only in the same lifetime but in a period of— How many years was it?”
“Two.”
She shook her head emphatically, and the bun at the base of her neck barely hung on. “The odds against something like that happening to one persontwicein two years—that’s just…just…”
“Astronomical?” Cy suggested. “Believe me, I spent a lot of time thinking about it while I was in the ICU for a month.”
The cloying scent of antiseptic and bleach. The constant beep of monitors. The dull, pervasive ache in his pelvis and leg where they had been crushed by the force of impact. The maddeningly persistent itch beneath his cast as it slowly healed a femur that surgeons had Frankensteined back together with a series of pins and bone grafts.
The gnawing, desolate emptiness that had crept into him during the ugly stretch of hours between midnight and dawn when the wall-mounted TV was his only company and the entire world shrank to an airless box.
With people dying on the other side of the wall.
Lyra lightly rested her hand atop his, and the contact dragged him from the clutches of dangerous memories. Her expression was full of the kind of grave condolence he’d come to hate, and Cy steeled himself for the inevitable platitudes that people often offered those whose lives they were embarrassingly grateful not to have.
You’re so strong.
I don’t know how you do it.
I could never…
“Have you considered that you might be the target of some kind of livestock vendetta?”
Now, it was Cy’s turn to lose it. Not the polite chuckle he’d curated for company, but the helpless, chest-rattling bray his sister Kiki had once described as a dyspeptic donkey.
It was, Cy had found over the years, weird enough to be wickedly contagious.
And Lyra apparently wasn’t immune.
